an introduction to awk

awk is a great *nix command line tool for extracting information from files - it's also so much more than that; it's a programming language in it's own right and if you know it well it's a great weapon to have in your armory.

Here I'll be explaining the very basics of the language so that you can build up a good solid understanding of how to use it. I'm no expert so what's displayed herein may not be the best method to reach each desired result and because of that I invite anyone to correct me.

I hope that all the code I show is equally useful to those that use nawk, gawk etc.